Leaders in African Film Today: the 17th Festival du cinéma africain de Khouribga

Nowadays there are no more traditional storytellers. I think that a filmmaker can replace them. To be properly heard, a storyteller needs to know how to strike with his instruments, whether the tam-tam or a camera.– Ousmane Sembène

African cinema represents the sum of its parts, the cinemas of all its countries.– Nour-Eddine Saïl

American and European filmmakers are coming to film our stories, our histories. It’s time for African directors to do this.– Joël Karezeki

This summer I attended the 17th edition of the Khouribga African Film Festival (Festival du cinéma africain de Khouribga or FCAK). This was my third time at the FCAK where I had the pleasure of re-connecting with various friends. In addition to showcasing recent African films, the FCAK regularly welcomes the crème de la crème of African film personalities. Founded in 1977, in the wake of Carthage (1968) and Fespaco (1969), the FCAK is Morocco’s oldest film festival. Largely underwritten by the Moroccan Office of Phosphate, the FCAK takes the pulse of Africa today.

Hugues Diaz, Nour-Eddine Saïl, and Bassek Emile. Photo: S. Shafto

Fourteen films competed this year for the festival’s eleven prizes. The festival got underway with a panel discussion entitled “L’Etat et le cinéma en Afrique”. Chaired by Nour-Eddine Saïl, head of the Centre Cinématographique Marocain and the President of the Khouribga Foundation that oversees the festival, the panel featured Bassek Emile, a Camerounais writer and filmmaker, and Hugues Diaz, the Director of the Senegalese Film Commission. In his remarks Saïl emphasised Morocco’s position of leadership on the continent. The debate largely focused on which model to follow: that of Hollywood or closer to home, that of Nigeria, the so-called Nollywood cinema. Diaz noted that the cinema offers an important tool for combatting widespread unemployment on the continent. Bassek played devil’s advocate extolling the virtues of Nollywood, now a world leader in production, if not in quality. Made on the fly for very little money, Nollywood films meet their needs of their audience. Bassek noted that African films are made for an average of

$600,000, but despite this investment often never find an audience. In contrast, a Nollywood film financed for a mere $5,000 will find a large audience. “Fifteen years ago, no one wanted to call the Nigerian productions films. Today, we must recognise their force. They have an audience.” Astonishingly, the Nigerian film industry accounts for 1% of that country’s GNP.

The Nigerian film industry producing 1,000 films a year is a little like American cinema in its infancy from 1910-15, Nour-Eddine Saïl opined, before titans like D.W. Griffith established a film vocabulary. India too produces a vast number of films every year (1,200), but with one crucial distinction: that country’s filmography, he added, includes some undisputed masterpieces. Saïl thus voiced his reservations about the Nigerian model, preferring instead to aim at relative quantity plus quality. Of course a Nollywood-type cinema already exists here in Morocco with the VCD productions in one of the three Tamazight languages. (One of these films, Malika El Manoug’s Tawnza, included in this year’s National Film Festival, was shown in a FCAK sidebar this year.)

One of the high points of this year’s edition was the homage paid to Ivoirian cinema where Bal poussière (1988) by Henri Duparc stood out. It tells the story of a middle-aged pasha, nicknamed Demi-Dieu, who decides he wants to wed the nubile Binta as a sixth wife… so he’ll have a wife for each day of the week, with Sunday being reserved for his favourite! Although in love with an itinerant musician, the educated Binta has no choice but to follow her parents’ wishes… but in the end Demi-Dieu gets his comeuppance.

In the competition, Amog Lemra’s film Entre le marteau et l’enclume [Between a Rock and a Hard Place], representing the Congo, likewise emphasises the routine degradation of women in Africa (similarly treated in the Moroccan production Derrière les portes that we saw last year in Khouribga). In following several characters whose lives will intersect, Lemra draws inspiration from Altmanesque narratives. But in a country that’s known a civil war in Kinshasa and Brazzaville, it’s not just women who are between a rock and a hard place. Well-intentioned, Lemra’s film would have benefited from a little of Henri Duparc’s humour. Droll, wise and forward-thinking, Bal poussière seems an impossibility in the current political landscape where political correctness often stifles thinking.

Senegalese Film Critic Baba Diop. Photo: S. Shafto

One of the pleasures I’ve had in attending film festivals in Morocco is the exchanges I’ve had with several Moroccan colleagues who often impress me with the acuity of their remarks. One such person is the film critic, Mohamed Bakrim: “The current drama of African cinema, besides its ongoing financial struggles, he remarked, is its lack of a unifying, tutelary figure on the order of an Ousmane Sembène.” Sembène was the first African filmmaker to achieve international recognition. The FCAK’s Grand Prix is named after him and for good reason. (It was salutary to see Sembène in the FCAK’s opening film montage, in rare images taken of the Senegalese master from Christine Delorme’s documentary Ousmane Sembène: Tout à la fois, shown in at the 2012 FCAK .) Of course, Africa currently boasts several highly talented filmmakers. But no one, at least yet, measures up to Sembène’s stature. In the meantime, Sembène’s writings on film should be mandatory reading for all film students in Africa:My first intent is to reach the African public. Europe and America are not my references: they are not the center of the world. I know they exist and I am very happy when Europeans watch my film, though I know they will only understand half of what happens. (1)

One possible candidate for this position is the Malian/Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako whose filmography was honoured at the FCAK 2012 edition. Unfortunately, his most recent film, Timbuktu, which competed in the Cannes official competition this year, was not shown in Khouribga. Hopefully, it will be next year. Nonetheless, even without Timbuktu there were many films in Khouribga this year that merited attention.

One such film is Andrew Worsdale’s second feature, Durban Poison, that won the Best Director Prize. A South African filmmaker, Worsdale studied on a Fulbright between 1984-86 at UCLA. For years, his master’s thesis film, Shot Down (1987), was banned in South Africa. While patiently biding his time to make his comeback, Worsdale supported himself as an actor and writer. His overview of touring the international film festival circuit with Durban Poison is a must-read. (2)

Publicity Still from Durban Poison

Based on a news story in South Africa in the 1980s, Worsdale had Terrence Malick’s Badlands and Godard on his mind when he made his film. (In the Q&A, the South African director quoted Godard’s famous line: “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.”) In back and forth flashbacks, Durban Poison recounts the volatile couple of Jolene and Piet whose itinerary includes a random series of murders. Piet has confessed, but the policeman on the case senses that something in his story just doesn’t add up. . . . The film opens with a shot of Jolene, pensive, as she overlooks the Durban port, just before her fateful encounter with Piet at the bar where she works. (It reminded me of the opening of Breathless, with Belmondo in the Marseilles port before heading off to Paris to join his petite américaine whom Jolene vaguely resembles, once she ditches her glamour wig.) The homage to Godard is corroborated in the bedroom sequence, a reprisal of the opening of Le Mépris, sans filters, ending with the famous line: “So you love me totally?”

During the Q&A, one audience member queried the filmmaker on his title. (In defense of that spectator, I note that the film was shown without French or Arabic subtitles.) To miss the aptness of the film’s title is, well, to miss the film. . . . “Durban Poison” refers both to a highly prized variety of cannabis (in local parlance, dagga, pronounced dacha). In the film, Piet plans a get rich quick scheme involving dagga. Etymologically, the word “dagga” derives from an old Khoi word dacha. In the 1940s, however, this original spelling was modified by South Africa’s ruling party to incorporate the phonetic “Ga”, an expression of disgust in Africaans.

“Since then this word has been used by the South African Police Service and the media to stigmatize the plant and the people who use it. The word ‘Dagga’ is presently not something said in polite conversation. When the word is spoken out loud, many people look fearfully over their shoulder to see if there is a policeman listening in. The word ‘Dagga’ is thus a highly sensitive and stigmatized word in South Africa and reactions to this word range widely from disgust, anger and censure to hysterical laughter and emotional release.” (3)

The title also works because it refers to the white trash underclass in the coastal city of Durban, where the narrative unfolds. Despite their dreams, Piet and Jolene just can’t seem to escape a nether world made up of trailer parks, low paying jobs, followed by endless nights filled with rum and coke, and lots of dagga. Worsdale also emphasises the extreme violence endemic, it seems, to South Africa (alas, not just South Africa). The director calls Poison Durban “a post-apartheid movie where the characters are losers, everyday fascists.”

Pivotal in Durban Poison is the role of the police captain, himself a survivor of South African violence. A few years before, his son went on a killing spree, taking everyone out at a dinner party, including his mother and himself. In a grim reminder of the ongoing trial of the international athlete, Oscar Pistorious, accused of murdering his girlfriend. . . on the night she first told him she loved him. Worsdale described South Africa as a country that when something goes wrong, there’s a shooting.

This year’s FCAK included several first films, including the Egyptian entry, Villa 69, one of three films in the competition by women. It’s the story of a sexagenarian architect, Hussein, who refuses to leave his house, a handsome villa from the 1930s with a splendid Art Deco circular front door. In an early scene, his man-servant tells him he’s taking a few days off to visit his sick father. Unannounced and uninvited, Hussein’s older sister, Nadra, shows up with her teenage grandson and moves in for the duration.

Hussein is crotchety and set in his ways. Nonetheless, he dispenses valuable life lessons to those around him. One viewer (filmmaker João Viana) pegged the film as a remake of Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), and it’s true that the two films would make an instructive coupling.In the Italian film, Terence Stamp delivers succor (via sexual favours) to the members of an ailing aristocracy. But if both films revolve around a male saviour, Villa 69 is clearly the antithesis of Pasolini’s vitriolic attack on the bourgeoisie.

Except for its final few minutes, Villa 69 takes place in the vase clos of this remarkable house. Located on the Nile, it becomes itself a character in the film. During the Q&A, the filmmaker told us that following the outbreak of the Arab Spring, some 80 villas, like the one in the film, were razed in Alexandria, where she grew up. In the past few years, there have been many reportages shot in the street as the revolutions have unfolded. In Villa 69, the young Egyptian filmmaker Aytin resolutely turns her back on such images to depict an aristocracy whose decay and imminent disappearance is symbolised by villa 69. Initially, the film seems resolutely apolitical, except for the occasional shots of Hussein’s next-door neighbour, a general who is a health nut. That Hussein and his sister have nothing in common is confirmed when we learn she wanted to demolish the house years before and when she befriends the general.

If Villa 69 was rightly criticised for several youthful gaucheries (an ugly edit that goes from Nadra blow drying her hair to a shot of the wind blowing in a field; fantasy sequences that don’t pay off; and a zoom that seems all wrong), I for one was not in the least bothered by the film’s languorous pacing that likewise annoyed several in the Khouribga audience. Those plans sequences and plans d’ensemble were appropriate stylistic choices for the story of this man who, unlike his sister, won’t survive the current events. . . The lead actor, Khaled Abol Negal, well-known in his home country, rightly won for best male actor.

Souleymane Démé in Khouribga. Photo: S. Shafto

If I was happy that the thespian artistry of this Egyptian actor was singled out, I was nonetheless sorry that there could not have been an ex aequo prize for best actor to include the Chadian performer, Souleymane Démé, whose dance sequences in Mahamet Saleh Haroun’s Grigris are simply spectacular. He’s the best thing in an otherwise specious production, aimed at the international festival market (the film was included in the 2013 Cannes official competition) and produced by no less than Les Films du Losange.

The storyline is thin. A young man, nicknamed Grigris (Démé) is forced into trafficking gasoline, despite his bum leg, to pay for his father’s costly hospital operation. Along the way, he meets and quickly falls in love with a beautiful woman whom everyone but him knows is the town prostitute, a hooker with a heart of gold. The film’s duplicity is epitomised in an opening scene: Grigris has taken photos of her for a prospective modeling agency that, she tells him, turns her down because she’s not skinny enough. Looking at her, the line registers all wrong because she’s impossibly tall and of course stick thin. The “actress” delivers the line with a kind of knowing wink-wink: afterwards I learned she’s a professional model. The film strives to be an African clone of good-looking international blockbusters like Jean-Jacques Beinex’s Diva (1981), with a few de rigueur African touches (as in the ending feminine choral scene, à la Sembène) that comes out of nowhere).

Still from Adios Carmen

It was a treat to see again Mohamed Amin Benamraoui’s first feature, Adios Carmen, a coming-of-age story about a young Moroccan boy, Amar, in the mid-1970s. In Dubai, it won a Special Jury Prize and in Tangier, the Best First Film and Best 2nd Male Actor [le prix du 2ème role masculine]. Some critics are calling it a Moroccan Cinema Paradiso because it relates a child’s love affair with film (the film includes no less than five excerpts from Bollywood cinema!). But while the Italian film quickly gets bogged down in treacly sentimentalism, Adios Carmen (blessedly) prefers a cooler tone.

Moroccan Filmmaker Mohamed Amin Benamraoui. Photo: S. Shafto

Benamraoui succeeds in encapsulating Morocco at a precise historical time, at the height of political tensions between Morocco and Spain. Set in the north where many Spanish Republicans fled after their defeat in the Spanish Civil War, the filmis also told against the backdrop of the Sahara question, and the imminent demise of Generalissmo Franco. Personally, I find Moroccan filmmakers attempts to tell their own histories particularly rewarding. The filmmaker’s close attention to detail in the costumes, the sets (he spent months scouring the Rif, before finally deciding to shoot in Asilah), and the actors (he auditioned some four hundred boys before finally settling on Amanallah Benjilali, moving and convincing as the young Amar) amply pays off. The film is in Tamazight, or Rifain Amazigh, with some Spanish. The opening credits, partially in Tifinagh, the Amazigh alphabet, are visually striking.

One spectator found the film overly violent. It’s true that the film does not shy away from showing a certain violence towards children, women and dogs. But this violence strikes me as neither gratuitous nor excessive: Benamraoui depicts a harsh Morocco that coincides with Mohamed Choukri’s description in his classic tale, For Bread Alone (1973).

Such violence is also confirmed in M. Abderrahmane Tazi’s haunting Badis, shown on the closing night in homage to that Moroccan filmmaker, a 1963 IDHEC graduate. If Teorema pairs well with Villa 69, then Badis would make an interesting double-bill with Adios Carmen. Although shot in 1989, Badis, like Adios Carmen, is similarly set in the north in 1974 (we know the year from a news item on the television showing then President Nixon on the eve of his resignation.) But while Benamraoui’s film takes place on Moroccan territory, Tazi’s film is set in the eponymous village of Badis, a name of great historical lore. The village is situated on a tiny peninsula connected to the Moroccan mainland and occupied by the Spanish since the 16th century. Up until Franco’s death, the Spanish maintained a prison there. In the film, a school teacher (played by Moroccan filmmaker Jillali Ferhati) arrives in Badis, with his beautiful wife, Touria, as punishment for her alleged peccadilloes in Casablanca. Touria finds an ally in Moira, the half-Spanish daughter of a fisherman who falls in love with a Spanish soldier. Badis seems to be a Moroccan remake of Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950).

But while Ingrid Bergman’s character Karen undergoes a metaphysical awakening in the dénouement, the two women in Badis are stoned to death for wanting to escape their hostileenvironment. It’s worth noting that Tazi’s dramatic choice of ending was highly contested by its screenwriters (Nour-Eddine Saïl and Farida Benlyazid) as well as its original public. Tazi has said that he was inspired to make a film after discovering the village of Badis. To his credit, the film evokes an undeniably strong sense of place.

Still from La Bataille de Tabatô

Interestingly, a third film in this year’s competition also focused on the legacy of the 1970s. It’s the entry from Guinea Bissau by the Angolan-Portuguese director, João Viana, La Bataille de Tabatô. (I first met João two years at the Tangier Mediterranean Short Film Festival where his stunning “Alfama” competed.) Partially colour blind (like fellow filmmaker Nicolas Refn Winding) except for red, Viana prefers shooting in black and white. His first feature, La Bataille de Tabatô represents a significant departure as he undertakes the telling of a recent sad chapter in the colonial history of the small country of Guinea Bissau, one of the poorest in the world.

After a long exile in Portugal, Baio, a former soldier who fought with the Portuguese colonialists to repress the 1974 uprising in his country, returns home for the marriage of his daughter, Fatu and to confront his past. His voyage to Tabato is meant to exorcise his treason as a harki. Recounted like a parable, the film brings to mind the words of French historian, Henri Rousso, writing of the Vichy past: “Un passé qui ne passe pas” (“A past that is still present.”) Baio’s compromised past may have happened long ago, but repercussions will resound in the film’s present.

Told elliptically without character development, La Bataille de Tabatô succeeds in recounting a powerful story via images, sounds and understatement. It seemed to me highly Godardian, while the filmmaker himself declared his filiation more Chaplinesque. (But the Chaplinesque element, the physicality of the actors, is of course also Godardian.) The initial voiceover brought to mind the opening of Godard’s Hélas pour moi: In the African film, we hear: “I learned from my father, Djeli Kedian who in turn learned from his father, Djeli Kedian who also learned from his father.” But while Viana emphasises continuity in transmission in Africa, Godard, on the other hand, stresses just the opposite:

When my father’s father’s father had a difficult task to accomplish, he went to a certain place in the forest, lit a fire, and immersed himself in silent prayer and what he had to do was done. When my father’s father had the same task to accomplish, he went to the same place in the forest and said: ‘We know longer no how to light the fire, but we still we know the prayer.’ And what he had to do was done. Later. . . My father also went to the forest and said: ‘We no longer know how to light the fire. We no longer know the mysteries of prayer but we still know the exact place in the forest where it occurred, and that should do.’ And that did do. (4)

Fatu’s fiancé, Idrissa, is a Mandinkan musician, continuing age-old traditions. His people created one of the most important civilizations in Western Africa and continue to inhabit the village of Tabatô where animism coexists with Islam.

The overriding influence on Viana in this film is clearly his childhood in Angola where he was born to a Portuguese mother and a bi-national father. Early on, he confided, he felt in conflict with the historical narrative then taught in school. (“I witnessed colonialism firsthand for eight years and felt betrayed by what I learned.”)

Still from La Bataille de Tabatô

Viana’s film might be reduced in its chromatic palette, but what it misses in colour it more than makes up for with its artful compositions that evoke the photography of Henri Cartier-Bressonand frequently feature one-point perspective. Aesthetically the most adventurous film in this year’s competition, La Bataille de Tabatô reminds us of an alternative cinema, one focused on sounds and images for its narration, rather than a carefully constructed, logocentric screenplay with a predetermined dramatic arc. The filmmaker calls La Bataille de Tabatô a documentary, because it reflects the legacy of the colonial empire. His comment also resonated with the remarks of the programmer, Rasha Salti, at the recent FIDADOC festival in Agadir and indeed La Bataille de Tabatô fits into her category of poetic or creative documentary. (5)

Another first film was N’gunu N’gunu Kan (Rumeurs de guerre), Soussaba Cissé, daughter of the Malian master Souleymane Cissé, that bravely tackles the current events that have been tragically tearing northern Mali apart for the past few years. The film opens on some family images of her parents in a courtyard. Shot as a reportage, it’s the story of a radio announcer in Timbuktu. He is forced to flee to Bamako, after he’s accused of encouraging his public to resist the terrorists in the area. As punishment, his wife is violated in front of him. As the filmmaker noted: “In war, it’s women and children who pay the price.” For Mohamed Bakrim, the film points out the limitations of the public space, frequently monopolised by those who don’t know, while those who do, remain silent.

The festival included two films about soccer. One Horizon Beautiful, representing Ethiopia, is a big budget European film (the filmmaker, Stefan Jäger, is Swiss) shot in Ethiopia. If soccer does indeed represent hope and dignity for many children in under-developed countries, the film would have greatly benefited from a better screenplay, as it was riddled with clichés.

The other soccer movie, Dust and Fortunes, from Zimbabwe, has the merit of being an African film. It’s the story of a young handicapped man who succeeds against all odds in realising his soccer dream. Dust and Fortunes won the FCAK’s special Don Quixote prize, awarded by a separate jury of cinephiles, which carries with it the guarantee of Moroccan distribution.

Still of Aure Atika in Nesma

Another film I was interested in seeing was Nesma, a Tunisian thrillerby Homeïda Behi, the son of Ridha Behi who presented at the 2012 FCAK his Always Brando. As in the Egyptian film, Villa 69, a house is a character in the film and lends its name, Nesma (meaning “breeze” in Arabic), to the film. It’s the story of an ambitious young power couple in Tunis. The wife (played by Aure Atika, the daughter of the Philippe Garrel d.p., Michel Fournier) is a real estate broker catering to the well-heeled. In the film’s opening, she does a house show of Nesma to her English teacher, a diplomat’s spouse, while her husband, Youssef is trying to get to the bottom of the theft of his personal i.d. The brooding atmosphere is murky, while everyone speakssotto voce. “I’m still whispering about certain things too,” says one of the characters. Everyone is on their guard to say what they really think. Not all is a bed of roses, the filmmaker seems to be saying, in Tunisia post-revolution.

Another film that interested me was the Rwandan Le Pardon by Joël Karekezi. It’s the story of two young friends, one a Hutu (Manzi) who succumbs to the mounting discourse of hate and kills the family of his Tutsi best friend, Karemera. Based on personal experience, Karzezeki lost his father in the genocide. Imbabazi: Le Pardon was shot in Uganda. The film poses the question of forgiveness in the post-genocide world. After Manzi’s release from prison, he attempts to ask forgiveness from his friend. . . Watching the film, though, it’s hard not to agree with Karemera’s wife who says that some things remain unpardonable, forgiveness is not obligatory. The director told us he felt compelled to make the film since already a number of foreign films (most notably, the 2004 Hotel Rwanda) have been shot on the topic. It’s worth recalling that in 2012, the FCAK included the feature Grey Matter by fellow Rwandan, Kivu Ruhorahoza.

Nour-Eddine Saïl during the Closing Ceremony

In closing, I note that the Moroccan government recently put Nour-Eddine Saïl on notice. Saïl has headed his country’s national film office since 2003. Currently, a search is ongoing to replace him, while an international petition and a letter signed by numerous African filmmakers have been sent to the King’s advisor. Whatever the outcome, it’s worth remembering that under his leadership, the Centre Cinématographique Marocain co-produced thirty-five African films (see the full list below). Saïl’s future at the CCM may be uncertain, but one thing is not: he has singlehandedly raised the standing of Moroccan as well as African film. (6)

About The Author

A Research Associate at Williams College, Sally Shafto is a scholar of French and Francophone film. Her most recent publications include editing and translating the Writings of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (New York: Sequence Press, 2016).